Mr. Birchum is here to make you useful — or else! That’s the vibe for a new animated series by Adam Corolla about a besieged high school shop class teacher, debuting Sunday on DailyWire+.
The show is written with the transgressive animated stylings of Futurama, Brickleberry, American Dad, and The Simpsons, and it stars a hodgepodge of political talking heads and dissident comedians. It succeeds in being funny and is the Daily Wire’s next step forward in building a parallel entertainment universe to the Hollywood establishment that has locked out so many of the people and values reflected in Mr. Birchum’s pilot episode.
The premise is simple. Mr. Birchum is a craftsman who should have been teaching public school kids in the 1980s. He’s one part Major Payne and another part Bob Belcher of Bob’s Burgers. He’s over the top in his masculine virtues but not a bad guy. Birchum is no Bart Simpson or Peter Griffin in that he’s not loathsome and lazy. He wants to get children ready for the real world and help them believe in themselves, but Birchum doesn’t possess the gentle rhetoric to say such a thing.
Adam Corolla masterfully voices the gruff Mr. Birchum, with former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly stepping in as his overzealous realtor wife. The Daily Wire’s Brett Cooper voices the teenage Jeanie Birchum, and Roseanne Barr plays Principal Bortles in all her weird, day-drunk glory.
For a show coming out of the Daily Wire, whose headquarters are in Nashville, Tennessee, it feels like a product of Hollywood, with names such as Rob Riggle (Step Brothers, The Hangover), Danny Trejo (Machete, Spy Kids), Jay Mohr (Small Soldiers, Jerry Maguire) and Kyle Dunnigan (Inside Amy Schumer, Reno 911) alongside Barr and Corolla and some recurring Daily Wire talent such as Tyler Fischer (Terror on the Prairie, Lady Ballers).
The show feels like a mid-2000s comedy, both in its self-aware sense of macho humor and unflinching bad attitude toward “kids these days.” It’s Tim Allen’s Home Improvement with more edge and an awareness of online culture.
Daily Wire figures said of their live-action movie Lady Ballers, the story of a group of male losers who pretend to be women so they can finally win basketball games, that it was meant to evoke memories of Hollywood pre-2008. Jeremy Boering, CEO of the Daily Wire, said of Hollywood comedy that it peaked in ’08 with Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and went downhill in the Obama years as Hollywood shifted toward an ethos of progressive social responsibility. And just like that, the outrageous comedy that had defined the prior decade and elevated the profiles of Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, John C. Reilly, Rob Riggle, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis began to fade away.
Enter Tyler Fischer, not necessarily a discount Galifianakis but certainly a comedian who carries his torch of flippant absurdity with a totally straight face. Fischer shines in Mr. Birchum as Mr. Karponzi, the he/him/zer diversity and inclusion officer for the school, also known as a JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion). Yes, this is a real thing because DEI was not cool enough for some of the nation’s nerdiest guidance counselors.
In Karponzi’s mind, he is not a hypersensitive, narcissistic wimp with no prospects in the world; he’s a warrior. Of course, the self-loathing JEDI of Teddy Roosevelt High School is actually just a new-age bully who uses the school bureaucracy to harass and intimate Birchum and his friend, Gage, voiced by Alonzo Bodden. As Gage rightly points out when Birchum is scheduled for a tribunal in the season one opener, “This is the first disciplinary hearing since that bio teacher pistol-whipped a kid with a dead frog; they can’t touch me, I’m black and that used to be enough, but I’m also bilingual.”
Spoiler: Gage is not bilingual. He just knows how the game is played.
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If you’re itching for a new animated series that doesn’t pull its punches on the culture war and is laced with dad jokes, Adam Corolla’s Mr. Birchum is for you. If I were to give one piece of criticism to the show’s pilot, it’s that like with Lady Ballers, Birchum is a reflection of a very online Right that puts perhaps too much focus on the cultural excess and linguistics of the Left. Conservative audiences, for all their frustration with stories of wokeness in schools and on TV, are just as hungry for normalcy as they are for culture warring against gender pronouns and DEI programs.
Mr. Birchum’s pilot episode is a rough few days of school politics for Birchum, but in the end, you get the sense that all he really cares about is having a beer at sundown next to his dog on a back deck produced by unsanctioned child labor during school hours. The good life!
Stephen Kent (@stephen_kent89) is the editor of This Is The Way on Substack, author of the book How The Force Can Fix The World, and media director for the Consumer Choice Center.
